Flow

The summer came hot, sticky and sudden and the idea, warmed by the sun and cheered by the greens, grew in Rory’s mind: a canoe trip down Beaver Creek to where it emptied into the Santiam near Salem, Oregon, a father-and-son-style trip into the wild, fifteen miles as the crow flies. Eric—the son in this vision—he’d be spacing out in the passenger seat at trees flitting by, and Rory would break in with a disappointed “Too low” or “Too high,” as he checked water levels at the roadside. Too much water in the creek and they’d slam their heads against any number of the tiny bridges spanning the creek; too little and they’d be portaging so often they might as well call it a hike. In the meantime, Rory prepped the canoe and secured permits: the creek ran through a short stretch of the outer bounds of the Oregon State Penitentiary, so you had to promise that there'd be no secreting of cons down the muddy waters to freedom.

Two weeks later they slipped their canoe into the creek and headed off. A clear sky, cool breeze and trees and brush enough to keep them in the shade most of the way—it really was a beautiful day.

Rory sat in the back, Eric in the front. During the first leg of the trip, Rory took a few long breaks so that Eric could paddle by himself and practice steering the canoe from the bow—a difficult but necessary skill in Rory’s opinion. He was determined that the twelve year-old would learn something on this trip. He pattered Eric with suggestions, instructions, questions, and numerous tangential observations about any fish, fauna, or vegetation that happened to catch his eye. Eric answered with his usual honesty: “I don’t know.” Rory, as was his usual, lost patience quickly.

“God damn it, kid. Why don’t you take more of an interest in the world around you?”

“I do. You just don’t think I do.”

“I’ve never seen it. That Shreaver kid down the road is always asking me questions, what with that worthless father of his never around. You, on the other hand, have got me around all the time but you never ask anything. Why is that? You didn’t ask me question one about this trip. You didn’t help with the plans. You didn’t even seem to care where we were going. You just came along. Is that what you’re going to do in the future: Just ride along?”

“Don’t know.”

“Well, start taking a fucking interest in the world around you, would you? You don’t do that, you’re going to end up getting nowhere.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I might. You just ask me three or four good questions before this ride is over. Okay?”

“Whatever.” Eric paddled quietly for a while and then asked: “Where does this creek begin?”

Rory launched into the history of 120 years prior, when the first white trappers named the waterway in honor of all the pelt-bearing, buck-toothed rodents they’d discovered there. Rory named the local tribes, the types of traps used and the more famous of the trappers. He declared himself to be a much ignored “fount of information”—a fount that, as Eric saw it, just dribbled on and on, but Eric kept that quiet. The sooner this question-and-answer session was over the better. Rory talked on, moving into obscure aspects of Native American mythologies as Eric watched the banks float past, rich in greens, browns and blues, while a bird or birds of hues unseen sang from branches high above an oft-heard but unnamed tune.

An hour later came question two: “What’s fire made of?”

“What do you mean: What is fire made of? It isn’t made of anything. It’s just radiation.”

“Well, what’s radiation made of then?”

“Don’t be stupid. Radiation isn’t made of anything. It’s just energy. Why don’t you ask me a real question? Like: What kind of tree is that over there?”

“I don’t care what kind of tree that is over there.”

“Why not?”

“I just don't. That’s all.”

Rory made a few deep, angry strokes with his paddle, but left Eric alone for a while.

The rich and tangled verdure hid most of the houses and the road for sure, so a person could, if they looked only at this screen, sink their mind into some romantic scene: a world unspoiled by man. But one could not, on the other hand, close out the cars roaring, the power lines humming, the dogs barking, the cows lowing, the children playing and shouting in the yards behind the trees. The screen was thick, but not thick enough. Eyes can trick, but ears hear and they won’t let us be.

Several times Eric and Rory had to lay on their backs to get under low bridges popping up round creek bends. At one point, they had to portage about two hundred feet through a stand of ash and nettles to get around a five-foot high waterfall. They were sweating and in a bad mood by the time they got the canoe back into the water.

“You know, if you’d sat close to the back, I bet we would’ve run that waterfall,” Rory said, mulling the plan for possible future use.

Sometime later, Eric asked question three: “What is the Earth’s average elevation?”

“What?”

“Well, I mean, if you took all the elevations of the land above water, and all the depths of those chasms and stuff under the oceans, and added them all together or whatever, what would be the average elevation?”

“Just think about it, Eric. That’s nonsense. Why don’t you ask me a real question?”

Around noon they came to a spot in the creek where the waters raced through a set of timbers supporting a railway bridge. A bend to the right guaranteed that whatever was carried forward by the water would, unless agile, be smashed against the beams before continuing downstream.

“Push away with your paddle!” shouted Rory as he worked to aim the canoe between two of the supports.

Nervous and scared, Eric rammed the edge of his paddle against a support and shoved hard, but in so doing was slammed against the far gunwale of the canoe. They rocked sickeningly for a second and then were through.

“What the hell were you doing back there?” Rory demanded once they’d floated clear. “You could’ve tipped us over!” Are you stupid?! Don’t lean away like that! Lean into it!”

“How am I supposed to know shit like that?”

As they argued the current swept them into a tangle of low-hanging branches and blackberry vines, knocking them out of their seats and the canoe over. Scratched and bruised, they scrambled to recover their canoe and gear before it disappeared downstream. A torrent of accusations and name-calling ensued, and would’ve gone on all day if they hadn’t needed to make to the river before dark.

“You want a cigarette?” Rory asked after a half-hour of sullen silence.

“No.”

“I know you sneak ‘em back at home. Just take one.” Eric turned and caught the cigarette Rory tossed at him.

The channel widened and straightened. Eric put down his paddle, lay back against his seat and hung his feet over the gunwale to enjoy the cigarette. The late afternoon air was still. Houses had given way to fields. The sun—free of branches and leaves—bounced beams off the water to sparkle, dance, and, after too long, dazzle and burn purple spots in the eyes.

“You know,” Rory said, “if we just kept going on down the Santiam, we’d hit the Columbia and could then float on down to the Pacific. It’d take a while, but we could do it. You ever dreamed of doing something like that, kid?”

“Nope,” Eric said, blowing out a stream of smoke.

“Why not?”

“Just haven’t. Anyway, what about all those dams between here and there?”

“When I was your age, I used to read all these adventure stories and I thought: when I grow up, I’ll take one of those trips. My old man never did anything like this with me, you know. You’re lucky. Direction’s all you need. What are you going to learn? What do you want to know? Direction, or else you’re going to end up doing nothing.”

“Whatever.”

“Of course.”

“Rory, I just don’t care about things like you do.”

“And that just proves what I’m saying.”

The trees thinned and then disappeared altogether. From their last edge rose the penitentiary: a great, black square against the sun, its outer fence a thorn-topped mesh sieving the sky. It sat there, an austere block imprisoning lives, weighing down the landscape.

A flash of silver caught Eric’s eye—a trout or young salmon swimming by. He shot up to follow it. The canoe rocked and, strangely, a splash sounded behind him. He looked back. Rory was gone, and then he was there: under the water up alongside the canoe, unmoving, just his lips and nose poking out into the air, his eyes closed. Rory waved his other hand in warning. Just as Eric was about to ask what was going on, someone shouted at him from the bank: “What are you’re doing out there?”

Two men in black and blue were jogging across the field towards him, each with a hand on his gun. Eric picked up his paddle again.

“Hold on there,” one of them warned. “You know where you are? This is prison land you’re passing through.” They looked at him, at the cigarette in his hand. “What’cha doing, kid?”

He glanced back at Rory. “Just canoeing,” he said nervously, and started back-paddling to keep level with them.

They took down his name, age and address and radioed the information inside. Their guns made Eric nervous. Every moment they detained him, he was sure they’d spot a hand or leg trailing along in the water beside. After a squawking response from their superior, they told him to get on his way.

Just as he was nearing a bend in the creek, though, one of them shouted, “Stop!”

He felt sure they’d seen Rory. Panic coiled its fingers around his neck. “Yeah?” he squeaked back.

“Where’s your life-jacket, kid?”

“Forgot it. Sorry.”

The guards turned and left Eric to continue downstream.

Once out of sight, Eric slapped the side of the canoe. Rory pulled himself up and looked around.

“They gone?”

Rory flopped inside. After checking he hadn’t lost anything, he took up his paddle again.

“You probably think you deserve an explanation, right?”

“You think?” Eric fired back, sarcasm dripping from each word.

Instead of answering Rory just paddled strong and steady. Eric watched him, but Rory seemed content to just soak up the scenery.

Finally, Rory broke the silence: “You never finished asking me four questions.”

“What?! Are you kidding?”

Rory smiled at Eric’s frustration. “No. It’s important. You ask me one more and I’ll tell you what happened back there.”

Eric stared in disbelief, then: “Well, here you go: What the hell just happened back there?”

“Not a good one, Eric. Not for you; not by a long shot. Ask me one of those weird questions again and I’ll take a crack at it. Maybe that’ll give me warm up enough.”

Eric thought for a while. “Okay, then: where do ocean waves start?”

Rory chuckled. “You just want me to see that if I start going into things like coriolis effects and winds and such, there’ll be no answer. Right? Here,” he said, offering up another cigarette, “take another and I’ll give you an answer.”

After high school, Rory had followed the hippies down to Haight and Ashbury, where he discovered himself to be a nimble if not unobtrusive dealer. He caught the eye of local police and had to escape back north after a couple of years. Still on the back-to-nature hippy kick, he begged his parents to let him take over an old family farm. But he soon lost interest in farming. Instead, he rented out the fields to cover bills and expenses; vegetables, apples and grapes he grew for himself, and for extra money and his own daily toke he grew a couple dozen pot plants in the swampy flats at the bottom of the hill below his house. Ten mellow and smooth a low-flying police chopper sighted the crop and Rory was sentenced to two years. And that could’ve been the end of Rory’s story; he could have sunk into the well-worn tracks of despair and depression paved by incarceration. Instead, he saw that his core fault had been his own lack of direction, and so he set upon a program of self-education and self-improvement. With the help of his family, he enrolled at a local community college and earned his teaching certificate. His criminal record, however, barred him from most teaching positions. After years of unsuccessful interviews, he finally managed to land a job as a substitute teacher at a grade school. Eric’s mother had been working as a secretary at this same school. They met, fell in love and moved in together a few months later, just as Eric was finishing up the sixth grade.

“So,” Eric asked, “if you’ve done your time and all, why’d you have to hide back there?”

“You think they’d just let an ex-con through penitentiary land? No way. We would’ve had to cancel this trip before we started. This way was better. Now you’ve got something to remember.”

The creek emptied into the slow-moving Santiam not far from downtown. They let the current take them a little more downstream before Rory steered them to a gravel beach where he’d parked his van the previous day.

They took their time transferring their gear from canoe to van and then tying the canoe to the roof.

“I’ve got another question,” Eric announced as they settled heavily into their seats.

“That’s a surprise. Shoot.”

“Is there really a past, or is there just a present in which we remember the past?”

Rory smiled and shook his head. “Where’d you get that?”

“Some book at your house.”

“Hmm. Well, I think if there wasn’t a past to remember, we wouldn’t learn anything. And we can make plans based on what we remember. For example, we made plans for today, and we followed those plans, so we had a good day. We learned a lot from this day, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, we learned that you can’t plan for everything.”

“You think I wasn’t expecting those guards?”

“Were you? But we can’t plan every day, right? And we can’t remember every day, can we? Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. I don’t know for sure, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying.”

“So, we just live for the future? That doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Maybe not, but that’s when you truly begin to live, kid.” He started up the engine. “There you go: a little koan for you to think about.”

Rory and Eric’s mom broke up the following year, and she and Eric moved to Seattle where she got another job as a school secretary. Eric and Rory spoke on the phone a couple of times before their increasingly disparate interests put an end to the conversations. Eric never returned to the farm or laid eyes on that creek again. As he grew older, he found returning to any place proved disappointing. He married and divorced twice, but never had any kids, and died drunk-driving at forty-five. He’d been the kind of drunk who claims to hate reminisces but is always getting pulled back that way by the suction at the end of a glass. The last words he spoke on the night of the accident, as he was being shoved out of the bar, were: “Beware sentiments—sediments? They make you still. Ha! Leave me alone! I can walk on my own.”